http://www.houstonculture.org/mexico/states.html
Please visit the site for a good reading experience on discovering your family history.
For those of us looking into areas of Mexico for our family history, there are a lot of maps and images out there labeling the states and cities of Mexico. This map here, provided by the Houston Institute for Culture is one of my favorites. This map is not just an image, but by clicking the various states names, it takes you to a history of that state. Also, there are other links that provides information on the various languages and also on the Aztec Empire.
http://www.houstonculture.org/mexico/states.html Please visit the site for a good reading experience on discovering your family history.
0 Comments
As a Mexican genealogy researcher it is important to use as many tools as possible to help aid in the search for long lost ancestors.
One of these tools is the book titled Enciclopedia Heraldica y Genealogica Hispano-Americana by Alberto and Arturo Garcia Carraffa. I had been looking for this book online for a while now and was recently able to find a few of its many volumes available to download as a pdf file. From the website Internetarchive.com the volumes are available to either read online or to download. Volume 1 link: http://archive.org/stream/enciclopediaher01garc#page/268/mode/2up Volume 4 link: http://archive.org/stream/enciclopediaher04garc#page/n5/mode/2up Volume 8 link: http://archive.org/details/enciclopediaher08garc Also, here is the link to the site’s “About” page for more information on this non-profit organization: http://archive.org/about On the site, there is also the option to create a virtual library card, which I am sure all of us genealogists and researchers will find useful. Whether you are a seasoned genealogist or a family researcher attempting to gather information on family history, taking a class or two is not a bad idea. There’s a wide variety of classes and courses available and the choices keep growing.
Here is a short list of Online classes available in the genealogy field. Some of these classes are for certificate, degree or non-credit. Please check with the site prior to registering for a course.
Trying to explain cousin relationships are easy if you are a first cousin, once you get past that, things tend to get a little confusing.
First cousins share a common grandparent as demonstrated below, but what do, for example distant 5th cousins share? How do you trace that? I have posted a couple photos below that is from Ancestry.com that I hope will help the fellow genealogist try to understand what could be confusing in cousin terminology. Again, these are not my charts, these are from Ancestry.com. I could not provide the direct link to the source because this actually is the page to my DNA results but I think this is good information to share. The following is a link that I can provide that helps explain cousin terminology, but I apologize if it is not accessible, you may have to be logged into the site: http://help.ancestry.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5226/kw/cousin%20degrees#res2 Happy searching and I hope this helps my fellow genealogists. Recently I made a discovery that I had a new cousin that I never knew I had. Bringing to life a part of the family tree that I thought I would never come to know.
Thanks to Ancestry.com, my new cousin and I have connected and have been able to begin to do some comparing and contrasting within our family trees. I have already learned so much. This new connection has just begun and I am looking forward to our future discussions and learning new information about our family. I'm looking forward to seeing what else the future will bring. I am aware this blog entry is rather short, and that is because this connection is just beginning. Who knows what the future will hold, we will see, but I am hopeful. Discovering your roots and going on the trail back in time, I didn’t realize I would need to learn a new language as well. I am researching my Mexican heritage, so yes I knew I would need to understand a few Spanish words, and being a non-fluent Spanish speaker, I didn’t think a few words would be too difficult. This is not the language I speak of. Written Spanish shorthand. That is what I am now speaking of.
I never knew or even guessed that back in the 19th or 18th and I am sure in previous centuries, the church’s way of documenting baptism and marriage records and the like, were partly written in a form of shorthand. I am not meaning the abbreviations that they used, because that is a whole other story, but for example if in a record were a symbol that looked like an equal sign, that would be read as “married". Or if there was a capital V, that was the symbol for illegitimate. For example: "= married" or “V —for illegitimate child of". Now personally, I have had the most difficult time trying to figure out what some of these shorthand marks meant. Then I stumbled across a book by Nancy Ellen Carlberg called “Beginning Mexican Research" which has really helped me out. Included in the book is a small chart that explains what the symbols are and their meaning. I am not saying that I now know everything about the Spanish shorthand and abbreviations, because that is not true at all. I have been researching for a little over eight years and I am still learning something new everyday. Just that, if you get stuck on something you may think is impossible to get around, such as a language barrier, keep trying, there is always something out there to assist. There is always help in the genealogy world. There is always a new little gem around the corner to help you along the way. Creating a family history website isn’t as easy as it may sound. Writing about it in a blog may be one thing, but to actually create one, is a whole other story.
Having said that, I have created two. I am very far from saying that they are the best things out there on the web, but I am proud of them. They are my works and my family history, and they took a lot of time to do. The first thing I thought to myself was, what would I want to see in a family history website? Every time I thought it, I didn’t really know the answer. I just kept thinking to myself, well… I would want to see some sort of timeline of where my ancestors traveled from, some names and dates and maybe some pictures. So that is what I did. The first site I created was for my maternal side of the family, I was able to all those things. I even made my own family tree template and put the tree on the site as well as the Home page. On my second site, I wanted to provide the same information as well, but with this side, the paternal side, there is actually more information and I had less time to publish it. Less time? Only with myself, I wanted it published. Ha! I was being impatient with myself. There is still so much more work to be done and I look forward to increasing my sites and building and developing them as I lean how to do so. Here’s to learning how to do things, learning about your ancestors, and having enough knowledge to know that you need to continue learning. Whether is is about new programs, software, blogs, web hosting or anything. Genealogy. I love it. I also love my family tree template. There is such an excitement for genealogists and historians to do grave hunts. At least there is for me. Not only can you gather information and add that information to your already growing family tree, but you are literally stepping on the ground where your ancestors once were. Is there also disappointment in grave hunts? Sure. If there are no tomb stones, there is no additional information. There is then only hope that the office at the funeral home or mortuary has as much information they can give you as possible. This is what happened to me on one of my trips to look for my great grandmother and her baby. I ventured out looking for her grave filled with excitement and camera in hand and papers at the ready with the information I had. My first stop was at the office at the mortuary, where the very helpful clerk showed me the direction I needed to go. After wandering around for a while, finally, there they were, mother and child, right next to each other. There were these two empty spaces of grass between other spaces of markers and headstones right up against a chain link fence. Following the directional numbers between the headstones, I knew that was my great grandmother and her son. Very sad. So I left that day feeling a little empty handed, but quite fulfilled in the knowledge that I was there with them, even if it was just for a moment. At the time of their burial, they couldn’t afford the headstones, but they were buried together, as they passed away together. So that is where they rest, in a beautiful cemetery, together, forever. I am glad I made that journey. I was asked the other day what it is I “look up” and how long I have been doing it, and I found myself truly rambling. I couldn’t stop. I began to realize that I was not making any sense and probably going completely off topic, but once someone asks me about genealogical research and what it is I “do”, I find that I can’t help myself. I don’t know if anyone else is like this, but I can talk about my brick walls and how frustratingly wonderful they are and then the pure joy once you’ve gone past them. I can go on about how I started from just a thought about looking into my ancestors’ past and who they were and where my family came from, (which now has led me to the 1750’s in Zacatecas, Mexico), to trying to figure out my husband’s biological family tree through DNA matches through Ancestry.com. There. Done it again, pure rambling. Genealogy is something I never thought I would love this much. It is more than just a hobby, it is a passion and a pure joy. Now to coherently sum that up in a conversation, that would be great. To describe genealogical research, how does one do that? I still don't know the answer to that question. Passion. Love. History. Luck. You tell me. |
AuthorMy name is Kristine, I am the creator of this site and have been researching the Roman and Perez family names for about 8 years and have enjoyed every frustrating minute of it. Archives
April 2017
Categories
All
|